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Discusses BIOS flashers and utilities from Award, AMI and Uniflash
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djf
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Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 5:21 pm

Hello. I am new at the forum but a long time nerd.

I have a bunch of slightly older Gateway Solo laptops, mostly 2500 and 2550 series. These are mostly PIII's but the 2500s are PIIs. All these boxes use the SST 28SF040 512K chip.

I was trying to install a DVD player in one of the 2550's, and it didn't see it, so I downloaded the newest Bios and Gateway update program, what a piece of work, anyways, of course it failed.

The problem is that with these particular boxes, the chip is located below the PCI video board, so hot flash is probably impossible.

I had used Uniflash to dump and save all bioses before I started, so images are not a problem.

I tried to Uniflash the 2550 bios into a 2500 machine, which also failed so now I got two dead machines.

Solution 1).
I have an old Solo 9100 board which has been removed from the machine. This is a 256K bios board, but at least the chip is located at a convenient place. I tried flashing one of the SSt 28sf040's, and of coare it failed. I figured it would have trouble with a 512K chip, but I was surprised it could not even write out the first 256K without problems. (PS: I am using the latest 1.40 version of Uniflash).

Anyways I looked at the dump of the 2500 bios (which is in fact a 256K bios burned into the top half of a 512K chip). Since the data is at the high end of the chip and I couldn't burn a 512K, I thought I was toast.

I was able to burn the image to the low end of an AM29X040. But the board (the Solo 2500 mobo) would still not recognize it.

I finally checked the datasheets and found that on of the Atmel 256K chips I had had a NC on pin A18. This appears to be the high order bit of the address portion. I burned the 256K image to this chip, popped it into the Solo 2500 Mobo, and Voila!!, the mobo can try to read from the top half of the chip all it wants, but it ends up getting the bottom half, in other words, it worked.

So now I am trying to ressurect the 2550 mobo, which is a true 512K image on a 28SF040 512K chip.

I still cannot seem to burn anything succesfully to the SST chip, not even the lower half.(What gives????).

But I have an AM29F040 which seems to do quite nicely for at least the lower half.

So here's the question. I can burn the lower half.

Can I burn the lower half, then take the VCC and bridge it to pin A18 to burn the upper half? My voltmeter seems to indicate an intermittent voltage on the VCC so I am wondering if the mobo is constantly reading from the chip. I'm not so concerned with blowing a blank unused chip, but I don't want to fry the board. (I did fry an old Intel board once using Uniflash, but I had the wrong voltage chip).

Anybody know anything about this mess, thanks!!
djf
djf
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Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 5:21 pm

OK, nobody replied.

So I used the 9100 board to try to flash the bottom, then bridge VCC to A18 and flash the top. Uniflash reported both flashes worked.

I popped the chip into the Solo 2550 and powered. No video - no boot - but it did give a floppy seek which it had not done before. I gave up for the day.

So this morning I tried the same plan - using an old Micron PII board w/256K bios.

I powered it up, popped in the new bios (AM29F040) and burned the lower half. I then bridged the A18 pin again and burned the upper half. I then used uniflash to dump it and looked at it with a hex editor, it looked like junk.

I've been having lots of problems with the PLCC pins not getting good contact. One hint for this is to get a very, very fine sewing needle and run it up underneath the pinouts on the chips. This tends to raise them up a bit and give better contact.

Well, what the hey, I popped out the chip I burned and stuck it in the Solo 2550, powered up. No floppy seek, did look at the CD for a second then.....


VIDEO!!!!

Windows told me it was changing the time for DST!!! Yea!!!!!

I'm so freakin brilliant some times it's scary.


WARNING!!!! This whole process is very, very fine, detailed work. NOT, repeat, NOT recommended for the faint of heart or those with shaky hands. The Micron board I ended up using was basically bought out of a junk bin and intended to be a throw away if I needed to.

But I still have never been able to burn an SST chip. Anybody know what's going on there, please let me know.
Rainbow
The UniFlasher
Posts: 3122
Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2002 4:16 pm
Location: Slovakia
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There might be a bug in SST 28x040(A) support in UniFlash...
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
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